On new media writing & Twitter

Let's be frank: writing has become really strange in the age of the internet.

Often enough I find that I can't write unless I have a high speed connection and the ability to toggle between several screens and sources—integrating, juxtaposing, and linking as I go. No longer do I sit only with a pile of books and underlined passages. (Okay, maybe sometimes.) Certainly, I still have to track down a lead at the library now and then; but I have to admit that these times are becoming fewer and farther between. I'm a little ashamed to admit this; but it seems dishonest to pretend otherwise. Usually I can find what I need with Amazon's "Look Inside!" feature; yet what I perversely like about this technology is that it still does not allow for copy and pasting. Instead, you have to do a screen grab of a page selection, and then still transcribe. I think that's an important hassle, and one to retain.

I used to plan for the rare times of no connection to focus on a single Word document alone, and to write some serious prose. For me this was often the time of flying, though that time as bracketed from internet connectivity is becoming an extinct phenomenon. Increasingly, we demand in-flight Wi-Fi—or we're told to "expect" it, anyway, as in this Delta ad:

I used to like to read on airplanes, too, but the proliferation of flashing screens on seat-backs (or the monochromotone of "30 Rock" on flip-down screens above) has made reading in-flight near impossible, at least for me.

This past week while revisiting (I wasn't flying anywhere) David Foster Wallace's essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," I was struck by his account of (allegedly) writing in Mead notebooks, on cocktail napkins, and in otherwise pen-driven ways. Of course this was the mid-90s, but it still shocked me with a mixture of nostalgia and revulsion. On the one hand, it's so precious: the writer taking notes in real-time, to be made formal much later. On the other hand, I don't know if I could write like that any more. I remember buying journals and notebooks and filling them up with observations, citations, witticisms, and other scribbles; but these days when I buy a new journal, it usually becomes a dormant object on my desk—pure potentiality, absent of inscriptions.

Over the past eight months I've become a Twitter convert. I went into my experiment with Twitter very suspicious, and even somewhat cynical about its seeming tendency for slapdash commentary, glib pronouncements, and an often sneering tone. (But then, has writing ever been immune to these things?) My savvy colleague Tim Welsh was helpful early on by giving me a succinct insight: it's just a tool. So I went into Twitter with a mindset of practicality and utility. The reason I was starting a twitter feed was to publicize the site that Mark Yakich and I launched around that time, Airplane Reading. And Twitter has definitely been a very effective way to direct people to the site and meet some terrific writers, travelers, and thinkers.

But the expressive power of Twitter quickly outstretched the purely functional aspect of promoting our site. Indeed, if Twitter is a tool, it's like a Leatherman multi-tool. And I don't mean the cheap knock-off kind; I mean the real thing—well made, versatile, and sturdy.

As I look back over my 893 tweets (as of this morning), I see an array of ideas, images, links, exchanges, and re-tweeted quips—all of which that call out for further unpacking.

My Twitter feed has become a place of real writing, research, and thinking for me. I'll often wake up in the night with a tweet forming in my head. Sure, some of these are just playful and attempts at being clever. But many are serious questions. And as they accumulate, I'd like to think there is a logic or at least an interesting accretion that starts to form. I'm not trying to suggest that Twitter is a 'finished product' (but of course it is in its own right). As far as traditional writing goes, Twitter is more like a collective, collaborative version of David Foster Wallace's smudgy and highlighter-blotted cocktail napkins that bear the messy traces of a finished product to come.

When Tim Morton noticed how the hashtag #OOO actually performs or even is object-oriented ontology, it got me thinking more about how Twitter contains surprising archives and spontaneous constellations. In my next book, which will be a sequel to The Textual Life of Airports, I'm going to do something with Twitter and airports, as one of many examples of how new media forms and air travel coincide in curious ways—and often with weird results. I have this hunch that human flight and digital technologies are approaching an uncanny convergence, and maybe even a crisis point. I guess I do expect the internet, at least for the time being.

Airports: The Interview

Sacramento Airport (SMF) Terminal A, circa 2005

A couple weeks ago I was interviewed for the Wisconsin Public Radio show “To the Best of Our Knowledge” for an hour-long program about airports. The fantastic producer of the show, Doug Gordon, discovered my book and read it with flattering care and attention to detail—and he provided me with a slew of potential questions in preparation for my interview.  Here are a few of Doug's questions, with my written responses: 

You used to work for United Airlines as a “cross-utilized agent” at the airport that serves Bozeman, Montana. What exactly did you do? 

Because the airport outside of Bozeman is a rather small one, the airline employees are trained to do myriad things: check in passengers and board them at the gate, but also turn on and off all sorts of machines around the tarmac, load and unload bags, sweep heavy snow off the wings and de-ice the aircraft, vacuum the floors of the planes at night and restock the SkyMall catalogs…the list of tasks goes on and on. As I write about it here, it occurs to me that it was a job that involved numerous cyclical activities, like some sort of religious or mystical practice, spinning things around and around. Of course, it didn’t exactly feel like that at the time. It felt like work.

What was it about that experience that you found so fascinating that you wanted to delve deeper into it?

To put it succinctly, what intrigued me about working at the airport was how it was a site of intense connection and yet also disconnection. What I mean is that airports are all about making connections—to certain places, loved ones, distant destinations, homelands—and yet airports are also able to induce extreme feelings of alienation, abandonment, spacing out, and futility. Particularly around the subject of space, airports require an awkward sort of double imperative: people are supposed to want to leave the present space (of the airport) in order to get to a more special place (back home, a vacation resort, whatever). I think this makes for an anxious state. 

Your book is called “The Textual Life of Airports.” What do you mean by this phrase –“the textual life of airports”?

By "textual" I basically just mean words, and other containers for meaning. Things that have to be read in airports. I use the phrase "the textual life of airports" to refer to the way airports involve layers and layers of written and spoken commands, personal stories, knee-jerk interpretations, ID checks, sudden gate switches, where the bathrooms are (and whether you've just entered the right one, or not), endless calls to distraction (Airport CNN, Hudson News, etc.)—all the demands to read in the airport, and all the different meanings that ‘reading’ acquires in this space. 

In your book, you argue that “airports have been situated as the place to read in contemporary culture.” (p. 2) How so? 

By this claim I mean to point out how reading in airports has been used as a way to promote e-reading (as in a Sony Reader ad I discuss on the book), and also other commonplace imperatives to focus on books, magazines, and other pieces of writing while in the space/time of air travel.  

Besides viewing airports as texts to be read, you also explore the idea of reading in airports. As a matter of fact, the first chapter of your book is called “What Is Airport Reading.” So let me ask you – what is airport reading?

It's pleasure and distraction, stress and boredom, time to kill as well as the most valuable time (don't dally!), it's light reading and heavy matters of safety and security...all at once, constantly converging and crisscrossing. 

You devote a whole chapter to how airports function in fiction after 9/11. How did 9/11 affect the way writers treated airports in their work? 

Well, airports became either more obviously tense and fraught with manic security measures and fear; or, they were just seen to be as bad as ever, as if revealing tensions and fears that were already nascent. It's this sort of question that interests me in the chapter on airports in literary reflections of (or on) 9/11: Did "everything" really change after 9/11? Or was it more accurately just more of the same, only more overt and ramped up? 

You write about “the airport screening complex.” The obvious example is the screening that we have to undergo when we go through the security checkpoint. How does this figure into the textual life of airports? 

The security checkpoint is a site where everyone has to read and respond in very specific ways: interpretation is the most guided here—we might even say hands on. But it is also the most urgent, pressing, and uncertain space for textuality (or meaning). What will people find out or disclose at the checkpoint? What deeply personal stories will be made public (or be successfully concealed) as people take off their shoes and shuffle through the metal detector, or hold their hands high like it's a stick-up and get scanned? 

But you say that screening spreads beyond the checkpoint and that it penetrates all aspects of air travel. (p. 81) How so? 

Screening spreads out across the airport and becomes about entertainment, display, capture (closed circuit security cameras; iPhone videos sent to YouTube), commerce, architecture...it's a metaphor that works across many systems, scales, and technologies. 

You offer an extensive analysis of Ani DiFranco’s 1999 song, “The Arrivals Gate.” (p. 93-96) Can you tell me about this song? What is it about this song that you find so striking? 

It's this beautiful yet somber song, with a catchy tune about someone who goes to the airport to just watch people and take in the ambience. But then it's an ambient song, too, sort of sounding like an airport—and the ambience ends up being almost creepy, and the person's hobby of going to the airport ends up a little creepy, too. It's a song that feels really uncertain about what sort of space the airport actually is—and this is all pre-9/11. I discuss this song in a chapter called "airport studies"—and this song, like a lot of other things I look at in that chapter, studies the airport, while also serving as a kind of still life or snapshot of the airport. 

You also write about the airport as an art space and you focus most of your attention on the Sacramento airport. You make it sound like this airport might be the artsiest airport in America. Can you tell me about some of the art there? 

Actually, Sacramento was just my local airport at the time that I started researching this topic and writing about the affects of airports. Part of my interest is in taking these "non-places" (the anthropologist Marc Augé's term for airports and other transitory spaces) and thinking about them really locally—almost, I would say, bio-regionally, as in how to do they exist in specific ecosystems and seem to depend on concrete (or perhaps imaginary) boundaries for their definition. What do airports tell us about how humans are inhabiting any given location or region? What animals move about these spaces? I start my book with an epigraph from Henry David Thoreau's Walden: "I have travelled a good deal in Concord..."  This is kind of a joke line, one that shows how Thoreau knows that he's making big claims from limited experience. Likewise, in my book I'm not talking about all airports, or trying to catalog airports once and for all, but rather I treat them as I encounter them—and Sacramento was an airport I spent a lot of time exploring or just sitting around in, waiting for flights.  At the same time, Sacramento does have some spectacular pieces of art, and I try to do justice to some of these pieces throughout my chapters, linking them to broader themes and problems that course throughout the book.   

It makes me think of a “New York Times” article from a few months ago in which you were quoted. You said that we should think of the time that we spend in an airport as an art walk of sorts. Can you explain what you mean?

I said something like while waiting around a terminal or wandering around the concourse, imagine that "you are actually part of a giant, living art piece, the architectural matrix and social swirl that we recognize as airport life.” I really mean this: a slight focal adjustment can make the airport come to life as a vast choreography, one with all sorts of set acts but also full of spontaneous sounds and unexpected scenes. Of course, this kind of airport appreciation has a limit, for if too many people tuned in to airport life in this way, air travel would cease to function very well. We wouldn't necessarily want to go anywhere, if the destination became the airport.  

Do you have a favorite airport? 

I really don't. I sort of fall in love with whatever airport that I'm in at the moment. For instance, I was connecting through Dulles a few weeks ago, and I was amazed by the circuitous routing of passengers up and down escalators, over taxiways, underground, on trains and off again, on people movers that look like something out of Star Wars, and into jammed concourses that look like any other. The airport had its own haphazard feel that was then assimilated back into the familiar fabric and texture of airport life. It could go from feeling so different to absolutely the same, in an instant. And then there were all the United Airlines ads that staged Mileage Plus Visa cardholders proudly displaying their credit cards in simulacral airport spaces. In other words, while schlepping through a subterraneous tunnel, you'd look on the walls and see fake passengers in fake baggage claims and departure lounges, an infinite regress of perceived airport spaces! 

You and your colleague at Loyola University, Mark Yakich, have created a website called “Airplane Reading.” Can you tell me about it? 

It's a site that collects nonfiction narratives from all sorts of people: travelers, airline employees, writers...anyone with a story to tell about the culture of flight. We focus on nonfiction in order to limit the scope of the site, and we publish pieces that are generally under 1000 words.  

Is there any one story that one of your readers has submitted that especially resonates with you? 

I like Ander Monson's piece called "Holding Patterns," which is about rethinking the seat-back pocket as a kind of miniature library, and all the reading material one finds there.  Monson inhabits the airliner seat as a small yet concentrated space that blurs public and private. But there are so many other pieces on the site that are worth reading. It's been fascinating see all these micro genres form out of the general trope of "airplane reading." Mark and I are now in the process of turning a collection of the pieces from the site into a book, and we are quite excited to see what shape it will take. We fantasize about the day when travelers will be able to discover a book called The Airplane Reader among other titles in airport bookstores...

"Report a problem": Missing Planes

Consider these two images, both captured from Google Maps satellite view, the first one three years ago, and the second one just last week. You can compare the images by orienting your gaze by the triangular pattern at the bottom, to see how the spaces match up.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the satellite view, it says "Report a problem." I'm not sure I'm quite ready to report this as a problem to Google, but I do wonder: what happened to all those airplanes? There are dozens that were there a few years ago that have now (apparently) vanished. Have they been redeployed? Sold? Scrapped? Where do airplanes go after they've done time in the boneyard?

Airport Studies

I've often joked about wanting somehow to acquire an abandoned airport and convert it into an art gallery—or just capture it as a tremendous art piece, really, everything around the normal operations of flight left undisturbed.  Another idea: take an old airport and reclaim it as a liberal arts college campus.  I like the thought of holding seminars in the departure lounges, and having studio art classes around old luggage carrousels. Intact aircraft scattered around the tarmac would serve as dorms, and the control tower?  Just think of the possibilities...

I suppose these fantasies are related to my fascination with "airplane boneyards": those places in arid geographic locations where aircraft go to hibernate, die, or be salvaged.  I can rove over the Google satellite views of these ghostly landscapes for hours.  Here's a snapshot of the boneyard outside of Tucson, Arizona:

There's something chilling yet captivating about seeing all these planes lined up, some cockeyed or askew, all types of military planes returned from who knows what far flung missions and campaigns.  Look at that swing-wing fighter jet with one wing akimbo and the other wing gone; or the one missing both wings and sitting off alone, as if multiply abject.

It may be that I have just finished rereading Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and it has put me in the mindset of ruins and remains.  McCarthy himself did not miss the chance to conjoin twentieth-century flight lore and post-apocalyptic survival; in one memorable image he describes wandering refugees "wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators."

This topic makes me want to return to Don DeLillo's Underworld, to mull over those scenes where one character has begun a massive endeavor to turn a boneyard into a vast three-dimensional canvas of sorts: "We can paint their deactivated aircraft."

Perhaps at my airport liberal arts college I'll finally teach a course on "airport studies," which will take into account the various weird ways that air travel lends itself to creative re-purposing, philosophical speculation, and perceptual shifts away from flight per se.  "Airport studies" is also the title of one of my book chapters that wanders and wonders down this path a bit.  (My book, by the way, now appears on the Continuum site in its paperback edition, for an appealing $24.95!)

Office Work, In The End, Never Complete

Below is the final installment of my essay "The Work of Literature in the Age of the Office." Scroll down for parts 1, 2, & 3.

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Coda: Office Work, In The End, Never Complete

The Pale King was what Wallace himself came to call the “Long Thing.” It was to be a Work about work, and ends up being an unfinished Work that yet requires more work—that is, more office work from other people (e.g. journalists, editors, academics) to produce a Work that can still never, by definition, be complete. The Guardian article quotes a Penguin statement about how Wallace was aiming “to be emotionally engaging and to write about boredom while being entertaining and to show the world what it was to be a human being.” The desire to “show the world what it was to be a human being” might suggest an exhaustively tall order, for any book to achieve fully.

But seen from another angle, Wallace desire is also what is achieved by any act of literature: writing is always necessarily a trace of human effort, or work. This either unique or obvious sense of Wallace’s intention for The Pale King is reminiscent of what was arguably the first great office space narrative: Herman Melville’s 1853 story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” While The Pale King adds to the complex (genre) of contemporary office space novels including Personal Days and Then We Came to the End, Wallace also conjures Melville’s much earlier tale that provides—in an anticipatory way—a critical backdrop for the contemporary tales of office work. I will conclude with a few remarks on “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

In Melville’s story, the narrator employs Bartleby to work in his “good old office” as a law-copyist:

At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.

The figurative gustatory language of “famishing,” “gorge himself on,” and “digestion” ironically anticipates the dramatic turn of the story, whereby Bartleby abruptly stops writing, and gradually starves himself to death. Bartleby’s shift in attitude is marked by his resorting to the infamous line “I would prefer not to”—repeated again and again in increasingly absurd contexts.

In The Parallax View, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains Bartleby’s maddening refusal as “not so much the refusal of a determinate content as, rather, the formal gesture of refusal as such.” Put another way, it is not that Bartleby simply stops writing in the law office, but that he stops (working) in general.

In the context of work and the Work as I have discussed them in relation to contemporary office space novels, Bartleby represents a critical stopgap for work (writing in the law office), and the Work (the story) takes place. The office once again is poised as the uncertain space that loses focus, dissolves in repetitive, endless tasks; meanwhile, the Work of literature emerges into (or as) the foreground.

In his reading of “Bartleby,” Žižek goes on to claim that “there is a clear holophrastic quality to ‘I would prefer not to’: it is a signifier-turned-object, a signifier reduced to an inert stain that stands for the collapse of the symbolic order.” In other words, “I would prefer not to” is not simply a “No!”—but rather states a preference for something in the negative. Bartleby’s seemingly simple refusal is in fact an embodied “structural minimum” that, when given, causes the entire positivistic system of production to tremble, by evoking a nonsensical yet present negation.

Critical for Žižek is the supposition that this trembling of the system remains after the system is gone—all systems must tremble in order to change, and therefore the trembling (which is a negative structural quality) should be a constant. Within the incomplete novel The Pale King, Wallace’s I.R.S. office is left trembling in its incomplete state. In this light, we might think of The Pale King as a sort of Bartleby figure always asymptotically approaching death, both before and without death, because an incomplete novel can never end. Thus Wallace’s own death might be seen to literally let his Work live incomplete, a curious testament to endless work.

To return to the first three case studies—Mad Men, Then We Came to the End, and Personal Days—we might conclude that what keeps these texts from being truly critical (of) office work(s) is that they, in a word, prefer to narrativize (often to excess) the office. The structural logic of office work is without end, and thus it endlessly affirms the relations and forces of production that determine the work. This keeps what Henri Lefebvre would call “the social text” legible—if still unread. Yet the Work contains work, offering the idea(l) of a meaning “in the end,” as the banal/apocalyptic saying goes. This is the work of literature in the age of the office: literature converts endless work into a finished product, and provides meaningfulness where perhaps this meaning-making itself might rightly be called into question in a way that the Work cannot quite manage.

Wallace’s The Pale King and Melville’s “Bartleby” complicate the work of literature in the age of the office, suggesting in their own ways that scriveners and authors alike will continue to die, but the work always remains—and (just) writing cannot break free of this dire matrix. Literature never simply reflects office work, but stands as a fundamental conceptual knot where work and the Work are inextricably tangled. For literature to be able “to show the world what it is to be a human being,” the Work would have to tunnel equally and endlessly into the work…accepting the full risk of never (re)emerging complete. In the end, Wallace’s unfinished Work will never have an adequate conclusion, and this most truthfully—if also troublingly—reflects the basic condition of office work which is, in principle, never complete.

The Author is Dead; Office Work Remains

I am fresh from my wonderful, stimulating panel on David Foster Wallace at this year's American Comparative Literature Association conference in Providence, Rhode Island. I am now sitting in the Providence airport waiting for my flight to Dulles to board, thinking back on all the fascinating papers and appreciating the eclectic group of smart scholars working on this contemporary writer. The airport is a perfect place to reflect and write. And now is the perfect time to post the next section of my essay "The Work of Literature in the Age of the Office." (Parts 1 and 2 are below.)

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Part 3: The Author is Dead; Office Work Remains

David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel about office work self-consciously bores. This point was put as a question in one online article entitled “Will David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King Be the Most Boring Book Ever?” To get at the complexity of this unfinished work, let us consider an excerpt that was published in the New Yorker shortly after Wallace’s suicide; the excerpt was called “Wiggle Room.”

This is perhaps the strongest (if strangest) office space story yet, because it tunnels unflinchingly into the boredom, tedium, and inner-subjective torment of one Lane Dean Jr., I.R.S. tax return office worker. The subject explains why certain readers might have been either afraid of or titillated by the prospect of a very potent dose of boring prose provided by Wallace. Unlike the novels Personal Days and Then We Came to the End, Wallace’s writing does not make wry comedy out of the day-to-day dramas, debacles, and tangential tales of office workers. Rather, “Wiggle Room” presents the reader with an understated mind/set of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts that bore in a double sense. Here is Lane Dean Jr.:

He did another return; again, the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and I.D. number that some part of him still refused to quite get memorized so he had to unclip his badge and check it each time and then stapled the 402 to the return and put the file in the top tier’s rightmost tray for 402s Out and refused to let himself count the number in the trays yet, and then unbidden came the thought that “boring” also meant something that drilled in and made a hole.

This sentence is representative of the entire excerpt (and much of the larger 'novel' from which it is drawn), which moves between contemplation and hallucination, all under a clock on the wall whose second hand’s “job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow, unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn’t already been a million times before….”

Wallace does not animate the workspace so much as he uses the bored (and possibly boring) subject to dissolve distinctions between the world of work and the life of the mind. “Wiggle Room” includes a drawn-out meditation on the etymology of the word "boredom," and this is a meditation that is meta-reflective and self-referential in many regards: for the reader afraid of being bored by the text, a text puts that boredom under an analytical lens; for Lane Dean Jr., his story of boredom is also a story about boredom; for David Foster Wallace, the novel story reflects not only a fictitious character’s struggle with boredom, but also the author’s own long struggle with a subject that finally consumed him in a final end—i.e., the very subject of subjectivity. The lonely, quiet office cubicle becomes a literary figure for phenomenological bracketing and tunneling introspection, a type of work that can “bore” endlessly, as in tunnel down, but also as in evacuate—this is the kind of work that no Work can finally (or ever) fully encompass.

“Wiggle Room” did not appear on its own when it was originally published posthumously in the New Yorker. A long article preceded this excerpt, in which D.T. Max reviews Wallace’s life and his struggle to write The Pale King. Max writes about the unfinished novel:

It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. …The problem was how to dramatize the idea… Wallace’s solution was to overwhelm his seemingly inert subject with the full movement of his thought. His characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the robust sincerity of his writing—his willingness to die for the reader—would keep you from condescending to them.

These final words are heavy, given Wallace’s suicide—and yet these words familiar, too. One cannot help but hearing echoes of Roland Barthes, who famously pronounced “The Death of the Author” in his eponymous essay from 1968.

Given Max’s assessment of Wallace’s writing of The Pale King, Barthes’s words take on fresh significance: “we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

Of course Barthes did not mean this in a literal sense, but in the case of Wallace and The Pale King, this theoretical position has been carried out in “real time,” as it were: the author is dead; office work remains. This might be an unofficial slogan for editors after David Foster Wallace’s death, faced as they were with thousands of pages of dense, ruminative, unfinished prose—about a subject—office work—that has no end.

As D.T. Max’s article “The Unfinished” seems to make clear, the text requires commentary in place of the author. The author is dead; but office work remains. First, there is D.T. Max’s article, written presumably on a computer screen (that minimal case of 'office space' par excellence), and fortified by ample research, interviews, and editing along the way to publication. Then, Wallace's publishing editors have to figure out—in their offices, pushing paper and entering text into computers—what to include, what to omit, and how to format an unfinished Work about work.

As a later article in the Guardian reported, The Pale King “is set for publication in the UK next year following an intensely contested auction between six British publishers.” The article quotes Simon Prosser, publishing director of Penguin imprint Hamish Hamilton, as saying: “[Wallace’s] challenge was to write about something so big you could hardly comprehend it—a world of mind-numbingly boring work.” The article goes on to explain:

[Prosser] was adamant that although the work is unfinished, nothing would be added to it. “You’ll get literally 50 pages of a perfect section, then a note to himself saying ‘insert X here’. In a lot of cases, the X exists, but there will be some parts that don’t. The challenge will be to remain as true as possible to what is there,” he said. “Personally I think that if ‘notes to self’ are included, it’ll be fine. We’ll obviously present it as an unfinished novel—he himself thought he hadn’t finished it. What’s so tragic is that he didn’t realise how close he was.”

Prosser’s adamant claim that “nothing” will be added to Wallace’s text encounters friction on the turf of the potential allowance of the “notes to self.” This begs the question of whether the literary fragment is sufficient on its own, or whether it would benefit from the author’s “notes to self”—yet if so, where would one draw the line? It is precisely this line of questioning that spurs one of Michel Foucault’s queries in his essay “What is an Author?”:

Assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work? This problem is both theoretical and practical. If we wish to publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for example, where do we draw the line? Certainly, everything must be published, but can we agree on what “everything” means? We will, of course, include everything that Nietzsche himself published, along with the drafts of his works, his plans for aphorisms, his marginal notations and corrections. But what if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an address, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not? These practical considerations are endless once we consider how a work can be extracted from the millions of traces left by an individual after his death.[9]

This looming imperative for “everything” to be published is exactly what Wallace was writing about in The Pale King: how to catalog without dressing up the endlessly boring contents of the human mind put to rote work. At the same time, it is the inability to delimit “everything” that makes the editorial work difficult, if not outright impossible: everything written in Wallace’s last years could never be finally recovered for the sake of the book, because writing (as Jacques Derrida would put it in another context), disseminates.

In “What is an Author?” Foucault goes on to argue that, “Plainly, we lack a theory to encompass the questions generated by a work and the empirical activity of those who naively undertake the publication of the complete works of an author often suffers from the absence of this framework.” Here again, one cannot help but be drawn back into Wallace’s in-principle (at least in the scope of human temporality, if not cosmically so) endless subject of tax form filing, of which “W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441” is a truly infinitesimal sampling.

One can never be certain about just how exhaustively boring Wallace was planning to be in the novel, because the complete Work could never encompass the endless work. And once we accept this fundamental uncertainty, how could one ever arrive at a conclusion as to The Pale King’s proximity to completion, as Prosser (the publishing director of Penguin) seems to intuit? On the one hand, Prosser admits that Wallace himself “thought he hadn’t finished it”; but on the other hand, Prosser, from the vantage point of the publishing office, is apparently able to see the real tragedy: just how close the novel was to being finished. This little snippet of reportage around Wallace’s unfinished Work reveals a tangle of theoretical complexities. To rephrase Foucault, we especially lack a theory to encompass the questions generated by the unfinished Work about unfinishable office work.

Endless Work: Office Space Novels

This is part two of my essay "The Work of Literature in the Age of the Office." (See part 1, below.)

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Part 2: Endless work, and the Work that can be Finished

If Mad Men is really about the contemporary moment and collusions of obligatory office work and personal screens, the contemporary office novel is really about a certain need for literature within what Joshua Clover, in his book on The Matrix, calls “the blunt quotidian of work; a nightmare as discomfiting for its ennui as its ensnarements.”

In the novels Then We Came to the End and Personal Days, what we read are two versions of the same story: each novel takes up the contemporary office space as a setting that spurs extra narrative material. However, this is not a simple matter of clever postmodern meta-fiction, but seems to have more to do with the purely productive ambiance of the office work at hand. In other words, even when these novels tell stories of boredom, banter, and wasted time—not working per se—the novels as novels maintain the necessity of (and a staunch belief in) both the finished literary Work and also the endless office work depicted therein. The literary Work and office work function as a double-jointed articulation, but one that reverses roles constantly, as I shall show below.

In The Work & the Gift, Scott Shershow argues convincingly for this irreducible bind between work and the Work:

On the one side, the daily exertions that are always done and never done, the labors by which one lives or, as it is said, makes a living. On the other side, the project or the poem, the opus, the oeuvre, of the Book: those achieved or imagined totalities… There will never be an absolute distinction between the two sides of the opposition, for to consider work in any sense is to of course also rebegin the Work of theorizing work: the unfinished labor of thinking its value, its necessity, its purpose, or its end(s).

Shershow’s schema provides a useful frame in which to consider contemporary Works about office work. Literature about office work takes “making a living” as a subject, and then rewraps this quotidian labor in the very aura of the Work (i.e., the novel). Writing about office labor becomes a reflexive project, also about how a subject becomes book-worthy: work becomes a topic for the Work. Thus the novels do not only sample the seeming endless stream of office work; they also rely on a totality at hand, the Work of the novel. Each novel is complicated at (and by) this junction of endless work and the Work that is (or at least in theory can be) finished.

Ferris’s Then We Came to the End chronicles the downsizing of an ad agency at the turn of the 21^st-century. A middle portion of the novel (pages 196–230) is devoted to the fragment of a novel-within-the-novel; it turns out that a peripheral character in the novel has been writing his own (internal, fragmentary, fictional) novel about the characters in the (actual) novel. This narrative layering underscores a problematical literary inability to capture the endlessness of work in the office: this work can never be completed—it never comes to an end (this is part of what makes it a comic or an absurd topic), and thus it is necessarily impossible encompass by the Work.

A novel about office work must therefore be about more than simply working in the office—for that is a boundless subject, a never-ending tunnel of tedium. (Thus, Mad Men wanders out into the domestic exterior of the “Sterling Cooper” ad agency: the office, in its endless work, is paradoxically insufficient for a TV drama—the Work of the show needs more than its endlessly working subject.) In Ferris’s novel, office work is not enough: there needs to be a character inside who has already deemed the office novelistic. The internal novel of is about a sort of transcendent literariness that exceeds office work, but also allows the office to be taken on as a subject. The fictive office worker, like the reader, must already know what is in one’s hands: the contents of a novel. The effect of this internal novel that takes up a middle portion of the book is that it elides the subject of workspace for the subject of novel-writing—there is a strange layer between the businessmen and the reader, and it is called a book. Can the endless work of office laborers be seen in literature, or is what we see always already mediated by the Work that appears idyllic, finished?

The setting of Ferris’s novel—the office space—is insufficient as a subject in and of itself: endless office work is replaced by the Work of the novel. In Then We Came to the End, the minor character Hank Neary is discovered toward the (apt) end of the novel to have written what can only retrospectively be understood as the inter-novel. The fictional office, therefore, contains a character who is already writing an inter-novel about the fictional workspace. The inter-novel forces a guise of coherence and completion—and posits narrative meaningfulness—to what for 380 pages has seemed to be little more than the dramatized minutiae of endless workaday office life. By placing a novel-within-the-novel, Ferris tethers endless work to the Work that is finished—and throughout, these oppositional forces are continually repelling one another.

For example, as if caught in the centrifugal force of narrative tangents, the second half of the book indulges in additional storylines. One of these storylines concerns the character Tom Mota, who is introduced as a borderline sociopath, or at the very least an oddball. Early in the novel, Tom begins wearing increasingly multiple company-pride polo shirts at once, layered ridiculously, and when he is confronted about this strange clothing choice, he states with unsubtle irony:

“You don’t know what’s in my heart,” said Tom, pounding his fist against the corporate logo three times. “Company Pride.”

Tom becomes unhinged in the office, and is rapidly fired (this happens within the first 25 pages of the novel). In the second half of the novel, though, Tom Mota returns with a vengeance, in a clown suit and toting a gun. The office space here is lampooned as a place for over-determined dramatic action. On the one hand, we might be tempted to call this narrative move an act of bad faith on the part of the novelist, as if Ferris is admitting that office work does not make an interesting enough story on its own—you need a man in a clown suit with a gun. On the other hand, we might understand this over-determined dramatic action as interesting in its own right as narrative excess: as a sort of reverse “job spill” wherein outlying stories obscure the setting (and the work) at hand. We might even go as far as to suspect that the Tom Mota subplot functions as a narrative tangent, a distracting vector that moves away from the endless work of the office in favor of a story with a tidy ending. Thus the laid off and disgruntled worker who returned to the office and went on a shooting spree is provided an absurdly poetically-just conclusion: we learn in the last pages of the novel that Tom Mota, after recovering from his rampage, joined the Army—and was “killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan.” This poetic justice might have been hinted at in Tom Mota’s near palindrome name, a signal for symmetry that, once again, obscures the office work that, because it is endless, can never be reflected in a finished Work which must venture outward, beyond the businessman, in order to end.

I do not mean to isolate the Tom Mota subplot of Then We Came to the End as an inherently poignant aspect of the novel. What the Tom Mota subplot demonstrates, rather, is a reflexive necessity for the office narrative to escape the gravitational force of its more immediate atmosphere: the workspace. The novel ends in this way, notably beyond the office: what Ferris provides is a phenomenally unspectacular (if also mildly utopian) conclusion of the cast of office characters attending a literary reading on the University of Chicago campus, where the peripheral character Hank Neary is giving a reading of the story-within-the-story. Again, I want to insist that this is not (or not merely) postmodern meta-fiction; instead, this is an embedded Work of literature that takes the reader (and the author) away from the alleged subject of work. It is curious that when the main characters of the story—who are represented by a first person plural narrator (“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise….”)—find out that Hank Neary has “published a book,” they remember him as “a failed novelist.” This is an aporia that the novel cannot reconcile: the actual literary character of the novel is twice disavowed, once in words (Hank as a simultaneously “published” and “failed novelist”) and again in the rejected setting (the novel ends not in the office, but at a University bookstore). Then We Came to the End represents a paradox: literature is seen to be that thing with and end made possible by endless work—literature becomes the Work apart, utterly incongruous with the day-to-day grind of the office.

Ed Park’s Personal Days is in many ways remarkably like Then We Came to the End. Park’s novel tells the familiar story of an office space under siege by abstract economic shifts and corporate buyouts, and the narrative employs a similar first person plural narrator in the first section of the novel: “Our company was once its own thing, founded long ago by men with mustaches.” By turns, Personal Days achieves a different formal approach than Then We Came to the End, but the novel becomes caught up in a similar paradoxical situation in relation to its own novelistic conceit. While moving at a faster clip than Ferris’s novel, Park’s narrative sags under an excess of sign systems that are ubiquitous in office environments: e-mail riffs, Microsoft Word jargon, HTML code—even an actual picture of a Post-It note dropped somewhat arbitrarily into the prose. The figure of the Post-It note is particularly curious, arbitrary not for what it says, but rather in its isolation as a secondary media form. We might rightly ask why Park does not carry this tactic to the extreme and include pictures of all the other office detritus common to this space: screen savers, stapler logos, dot-matrix printer page perforations, office chair tracks in carpet—the list of items is in principle endless, and arguably aesthetically interesting. Yet, if the office space is a sort of ready-made art object, what makes the novel a necessary or useful form of representation? Indeed, one vexing question about Personal Days is why it needs to take the form of a novel at all; its format as evinced by the contents reveals that it is perhaps most interested in the computer programs that shape everyday life in the office:

I. Can’t Undo 1
II. Replace All 85
III. Revert to Saved 191

One cannot help but wonder if a more immersive aesthetic production could have been achieved in an installation involving the computer commands, not unlike David Byrne’s “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information,” stylized PowerPoint presentations that utilize all of the preprogrammed styles and formatting to show how medium and message are inescapably intertwined in the ubiquitous software. As it is, the three parts of Personal Days each take a quite different form. Part one involves short sections under pithy, workspace allusive headings such as “The cc game” and “Multiple-desk syndrome.” Part two unravels in the style of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, an elaborated (if at times enigmatic) outline that accumulates to continue the story of the office. Part three is comprised of one very long email with no paragraph breaks and constant reflections on the email itself as a communicative medium. Within each of these narrative forms, sub-forms appear. One of the more curious sub-forms is aggressively yet ambiguously literary.

As in Ferris’s novel, Personal Days contains a text-within-the-text. In this case, in the middle section—“II(E)”—of Personal Days, one of the office workers discovers a cryptic notebook in a recently fired employee’s desk. The laid off co-worker was named Jill; the notebook left behind therefore carries the intertextual title “The Jilliad.” The notebook contains pages and pages of corporate aphorisms and maxims for the office worker, for example:

Don’t be the one who says, I told you so. Tell them so to begin with. Tell them often.
—Office Politics 101, by Randall Slurry

Think of the office as an ocean liner. Are you the captain? A passenger? Or the person who plays xylophone for the lido deck band?
—Climbing the Seven-Rung Ladder: The Business of Business, by Chad Ravioli and Khâder Adipose

Confusion is inevitable. Ride the Wave.
—The Manager’s Bible: The New Memory System for Daily Insights, by Wayne V. Hammer with Juliette Earp

“The Jilliad” functions as an internal manuscript that does not so much comment on the forces or relations of production in the office as it justifies an ostensibly pure literariness of the work at hand (as well as the Work in hand). The fictional object of literature—an epic/pastiche of “ghostwritten CEO memoirs, Machiavellian road maps, and PowerPoint-friendly wealth manuals”—exists as a sort of internal referent, proof, as it were, that office work is literary, and that what the reader is holding is also literary. The office workers in Personal Days come to understand The Jilliad as “a sort of modern cautionary tale, or myth, or something”—meanwhile, the novel itself has somewhat lost focus. The characters are not at work; rather, they are fixated on a Work, on a fictitious act of literature that necessarily exceeds the narrative at hand. Real labor relations and forces of production are obfuscated in exchange for a quasi-mystery plot surrounding a text whose “author was a ghost” and whose “manuscript was unstable.”

The office is an endless setting for Personal Days; the office only gains its novelistic adequacy through external (and structurally unavailable) textual material. The Work lies outside of actual office work—yet the Work must be discovered or located inside the workplace, in order to make the subject literary. We arrive again at the bind between work as an endless subject, and the Work as an object, discrete and able to be finished. When the office novel becomes extra literary, the specter of the finished Work distracts from the real endlessness of work.

Swamp Things (or, Common Curriculum Matters)

One of my students who works for the campus newspaper recently asked me if I "had any opinions about anything"—and if so, if I'd write a short column for the paper. My university has these things that are called "common curriculum" courses, required across (most) programs for graduation—basically, the common curriculum makes up the core of our idea of a liberal arts education. These courses are sometimes viewed as hindrances to getting through college, but I wanted to suggest some ways to think differently about them. So I wrote the following piece, which is at the Loyola Maroon website, but without all the Nietzschean italics I sometimes resort to; here's the original:

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As registration for the Fall semester nears, I find myself having spirited conversations with my advisees about what classes to take, how their majors are shaping up, and so on.

A common anxiety that many students voice has to do with what they should be studying: what they should be majoring in, minoring in, and otherwise focusing on. And then, there are all those irksome common curriculum credits to get out of the way!

Such anxieties seem to stem from ambient concerns (often uttered by parents who are either writing tuition checks or co-signing loan papers) about the “investment” or “value” that is a college education, and whether or not it will “pay off” in the long run.

These financial ways of understanding college have always baffled me. Certainly, college costs money. Most things do. But your college education is not something that will ever pay off: you can’t sell it in one grand “buy out” deal, and it doesn’t gain interest over time. Or rather, the interest that you gain from your college education is precisely your life. Its rate of return is entirely up to you.

And this is why the common curriculum matters: it’s your life we’re talking about. College is about helping you become interesting—hopefully for the rest of your life. One idea that motivates the common curriculum is that it is helping you expand your mind and become a versatile thinker. It’s not just about checking off boxes on the way to a single, focused degree that will jettison you into a fabulously lucrative life.

If the common curriculum sometimes feels like it is slowing you down, that’s exactly what it’s meant to do. College is, to a certain extent, about getting bogged down in the mud and muck that is intellectual development. And it needs time to take place.

The common curriculum is perhaps the soupiest part of this boggy terrain, an uncertain expanse you have to plod though. But it’s also where you can learn to make surprising and imaginative connections between subjects. It’s where you might stumble upon things that you never knew could make your brain pop in such a way. (This is why, in many stories, wetlands are where the imagination takes flight; it’s also one reason why we should care about them.)

Rather than think about the common curriculum as an annoying obstacle or a morass, try to embrace it as precisely one of the reasons why you are fortunate to be at a liberal arts university.

And if you don’t have a major yet, or feel like you’re flailing around trying to get a grip—it’s okay! You have four years to perambulate around this spongy landscape, and to home in on a particular field of study. Your advisors are here to help. And as you go along, don’t stress out about how your courses are going to “add up” or “pay off” after you graduate. Instead, try to appreciate how your coursework is simply congealing.

When you have a difficult time explaining to your parents or friends at home how all your classes fit neatly together, take some comfort in knowing that your college education is doing just what it’s designed to do: be messy along the way.

I’m not saying that majors, degrees, or disciplinary knowledges are a farce; they provide wonderful structures and focusing mechanisms for analytic thought. As you get close to graduating, you’ll appreciate the composition, complexity, and integrity of whatever you end up majoring in.

Here, though, I have just wanted to take a few hundred words to speak up for the more abstract aspects of the common curriculum, and to turn some complaints, irritations, and gripes on their heads. Celebrate the common curriculum—and all the other ambiguous parts of your college education—as exactly why you are here.

You’re here to take courses that will bend your brain in new and strange ways. You’re here to be sometimes disoriented, and to get confused. You’re here to slow down.

These things are of inestimable value; or really, they go beyond value altogether. College isn’t about investing, accruing, or cashing out. It’s about sinking in.

The Work of Literature in the Age of the Office

Inspired by a post on the Continuum Literary Studies blog today, I thought I'd share here part of an essay I wrote a couple years ago for a book called Merchants, Sellers, Barons, and Suits: The Changing Images of the Businessman Through Literature. My chapter in the book is called "The Work of Literature in the Age of the Office."

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Part 1: The Literary Reflexes and Imperatives of Mad Men

If we are to believe Mad Men, advertising agencies in the late 1950s and early 1960s expose people at their worst. These workspaces reveal a rarified soul of the mid-century (mostly male) American who is self-made, cutthroat, libertarian to the core, and often fleeing a nasty or otherwise murky past. Mad Men explicitly refutes Raymond Williams’s 1970s theory of “real advertising” as an ordinary form of public notice—as if there could be a form of marketing existing in a pure relationship to honest, everyday life. Rather, what one sees in Mad Men is an advertising office environment that seeps into and subsumes the quotidian: there is no life outside of advertising work. The work makes life worth living.

But what if the real context of Mad Men is not the late 1950s and early 1960s at all, but in fact is the turn of the 21^st-century office space, where actual lives play out in fantastically un-dramatic and banal scenarios every day? Mad Men is called a “period drama”—but the show more accurately reflects contemporary conditions. In this way of understanding the show, Mad Men would be a subtle form of job spill, that sociological phenomenon wherein instruments of labor leak into so-called “personal technologies”—mobile phones, PDAs, email, Bluetooth devices, laptops—such that one is able to continue working at any point in the “off hours” while under the impression that one is not “at work.”

Increasingly, job spill runs both ways: leisure time becomes seamlessly enmeshed in work-time (through instant messaging, chatting, email, YouTube, eBay, and the other new media forms), and work-time becomes the perverse object of enjoyment for leisure time: one can repose at the end of a long day at the office and watch Mad Men. In other words, watching a TV show about work can counter-intuitively make one better at work in the office—indeed, one becomes ready to work in the office at any moment.

What I am proposing here is an inversion of Joshua Clover’s shrewd argument that the futuristic sci-fi film The Matrix can in fact be read as an allegory of the 1990s U.S. tech-boom and all the humdrum office work predicated thereon. According to Clover, The Matrix was not about a speculative future; rather, it was about the contemporaneous moment that was just as pervasive as (if more boring than) a land of hovercrafts, superhero leaps, and robots. In Clover’s words, the office spaces of the 90s tech boom functioned as “a mass of systems, agreements, leverages and interlocked interests of a complexity no individual can encompass, codified by documents no one sees. It’s not a place, really, just a set of codes….”

A similar sense of endless work is very much the looming sense of Mad Men: through a stream of stories centered around the advertising office, a set of seemingly universal “codes” sinks in about the constancy of work. If The Matrix’s future is really about workers in the contemporaneous late-90s, I am suggesting that Mad Men’s past is actually about what it is like to work at the end of first decade of the 21^st-century. By reinforcing the endlessness of work, the show cumulatively replaces what Jacques Lacan called the “spatial identification” of the “mirror stage” with a glimmering TV screen that reflects more clearly, and is far more alluring: these shows about the “leverages and interlocked interests” of the ad office assure audiences of a narrative meaningfulness in work (even in its most vicious möbius arrangement: work and leisure, never quite separable). If watching TV is the antidote for a long day at the office, then watching a show about office work soothes doubly, for it diminishes the difference between labor and leisure that much more: working reminds one of what one can see on TV.

Likewise, TV reminds one of what happens “at work,” as Lev Manovich describes labor in the information age: “All kinds of work are reduced to manipulating data on one’s computer screen, that is, to the processing of information.” Sitting in front of a TV processing a series is not all that unlike sitting in front of a computer screen entering data. (Thus older deep TV sets and computer monitors evolve into flat-screens that can toggle alternately between entertainment and work displays, with the mere tap of a button.) In this practical/ideal scenario, then, job spill so thoroughly infiltrates leisure time to the point where even seemingly relaxing in front of the TV trains one to be a better worker, at the most basic level by reinforcing the body/screen arrangement synonymous with so much contemporary office work.

Within the series, Mad Men contains another feature of narrative reflexivity: the persistent imperative for the characters to become literary. The main characters of Mad Men are in one sense “writers”—they write copy and author marketing campaigns. However, there is a persistent undercurrent wherein certain characters desire to be literary writers. In an early episode in the series, the account executive Ken Cosgrove (played by Aaron Staton) has a short story published in The Atlantic, and the copywriters in the office are either proud of him or extremely jealous; in reference to this event, the boss Roger Sterling (John Slattery) quips that in every ad man there is an aspiring novelist. Another account executive, Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), is very envious of Cosgrove, and therefore has his wife pull strings with an ex-boyfriend who is an editor in order to get his story published; but instead of being published in The New Yorker, Campbell’s story ends up in Boys’ Life, and he is furious. At another point in the show, the copywriter Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis) steals a typewriter from the office so he can work on his plays at home. Consistently and throughout, the senior boss Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) makes references in a worshipful tone to the writings of Ayn Rand. To mention only one more instance, in the first episode of the second season, the main character of the show, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), notices a youngish hipster in a bar reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency. The episode ends with Draper reading O’Hara’s poems to himself, ruminating on literature—we hear Draper reading in a voiceover, his furrowed brow the sign of profound literary contemplation. (So much like the fringes in Julius Caesar that, according to Roland Barthes, are "quite simply the label of Roman-ness.")


This literary landscape within Mad Men is not just fictive terrain: after the Mad Men allusion to O’Hara’s collection of poems, the book became a “Hot Trend” on Google and was promptly out of stock at Amazon. Mad Men not only trains us how to work, but also how to consume—both, of course, looping around into one another, like sitting before a TV show and one’s work in front of a computer screen. If indeed Mad Men reflects the seamlessness of office work in contemporary life, the literary dimension becomes a latent urge, an unconscious desire for legitimization.

And if there seems to be a dynamic of complicity between literature and office work in Mad Men, this dynamic is further evinced in three recent literary works: Joshua Ferris’s 2007 novel Then We Came to the End, Ed Park’s 2008 novel Personal Days, and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King (posthumously published in 2011). These three examples are interesting not only as literary representations of office spaces; these novels also exhibit critical tensions within and around the literariness of office work in general...

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(The essay goes on to discuss those three novels; I'll post the other parts of the essay soon.)